Emergent Public-Private Urban Development Authorities and Municipal Oversight: The Case of BIDs.

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are members of an emergent family of quasi-public organizations involved in urban economic development that combine public and private organizational features. BIDs are formally private non-profit corporations legislatively enabled to collect assessments on district commercial properties. If an assessment is left unpaid a lien is put on that property by local government. BIDs share a broad governmental mission to affect overall quality of life in their districts as agents of commercial revilatization. Their expenditures can include supplemental service delivery in sanitation and security, neighborhood marketing and promotion, capital improvements, and even social services such asyouth and homeless programs. BIDs' public-style purpose and power to assess commercial properties alongside private-style decision-making capabilities provides a structural ambiguity that allows for exploration of whether public or private institutional tendencies dominate BIDs. Oversight is a critical feature of publicness and privateness. Public organizations are traditionally viewed as subject to more stringent monitoring than private ones. Analysis of the quality of oversight a BID receives speaks to a powerful dimension of publicness and privateness. The degree to which BIDs are evaluated by the municipal agency responsible for their oversight would enhance their degree of publicness. This paper examines the degree of oversight provided by local government over 6 New York City BIDs that differ in budget sizes and socio-economic districts. Findings suggest that the municipal agency charged with BID oversight acts as BIDs' advocate within local government, rather than as BIDs' regulator. Only in the case of exceptional leadership, when individual bureaucrats choose to view themselves as regulators, does the agency engage in effective BID oversight. BIDs are thereby able to maintain more private degrees ofaccountability to regulators while sustaining governmental authority to tax and spend within their districts. As private corporations, BIDs are able to avoid governmental regulatory standards while performing historically public roles in their communities. Lack of BIDs' public accountability raises substantial questions about the degree of democracy at work in their governance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]